Latest Linux and open source news from around the web
Over the past year Jay has been in development as a new open-source shader compiler for Intel GPUs. Alyssa Rosenzweig has been leading its development since joining Intel in 2025. For Mesa 26.3 the Jay shader compiler is being enabled by default for modern Intel graphics hardware and is around ~10% faster than the existing BRW compiler code...
KDE Plasma 6.8 picks up more UI polish and fixes ahead of its final release, while early Plasma 6.9 improvements are already starting to land.
BPF-based HID drivers have helped to deliver quirks/fixes for different HID devices more quickly than being bound by the conventional kernel cycle. Loading these eBPF programs from user-space have shown a lot of potential for innovating and iterating more quickly with BPF drivers for different subsystems. The latest area now seeing the BPF treatment are display panel drivers...
GoZen 0.14 marks the open-source video editor’s move into beta, bringing a minimalist Linux-first editing experience built on Godot and FFmpeg.
D7VK as a Vulkan-based implementation of the Microsoft Direct3D 7 / 6 / 5 / 3 APIs for Linux/Wine (Steam Play) usage is out with version 2.3 and the developer now believing its marking the point that the project is rather mature...
Following the FUSE improvements in Linux 7.3 for file-systems in user-space, it looks like the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be ready to enable the large folios feature...
The Igalia consulting firm working with Valve is aiming to improve the Firefox web browsing experience when running on the Steam Deck handheld Linux-powered device...
AMD engineers continue to prepare for upcoming Zen 6 powered Ryzen client processors on Linux...
gThumb’s big GTK4 and Vala rewrite is now officially stable and available for download. I previewed the gThumb 4.0 alpha back in May, remarking on how much of a difference the UI refresh makes to the app – the long-serving photo manager looks like an entirely new app. Every part of gThumb’s interface benefits from the port to GTK4/libadwaita, backend performance is improved by using newer versions of libraries and desktop integration catches up – on GNOME, the modern file chooser with icon thumbnails is used. Greater use of padding and spacing gives everything – editing tools, file properties, settings, […]
Ubuntu 26.10 ‘Stonking Stingray’ is about to be released – but what will the next release be called? Right now, we don’t know, but care to take a guess? Traditional dictates that the Ubuntu 27.04 title will be made up of an adjective and animal (real or mythical) that both begin with the letter ‘T’. There’s been a tranche of terrific names of late: But these tell us one thing: the codename combo is rarely an obvious pairing. On the adjective side, Ubuntu swings from silly (Saucy, Bionic, Disco, Hirsute) to professional (LTS’ have used Hardy, Trusty, Resolute) to “eDuKaShuNal“, […]
Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 6 1.03 distribution is now available for download based on the Debian GNU/Linux 13.7 “Trixie” operating system and introducing new accessibility features.
Firefox 158 open-source web browser is now available for public beta testing with better PDF handling, New Tab improvements, and other changes.
Shiva is entering development for Mesa Vulkan drivers as a new framework akin to Gallium3D but for Vulkan drivers rather than OpenGL. It's going to be some time before the work will come to fruition but should hopefully lead to more code sharing and a better Mesa Vulkan driver development experience in the future...
Oxygen continues its comeback with Plasma 6.8, adding better accent color support, refreshed cursors, more icons, and visual fixes.
qBittorrent 5.2.4 open-source BitTorrent client is now available for download with various bug fixes and improvements, especially for the web-based user interface.
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